SEO should be a standard no matter your business or industry. Without it, competitors will leave you in the dust. And if competitors don’t do SEO, you’re wasting a massive opportunity.
You must hire a solid SEO team to help build your online presence. However, hiring locally can quickly run up costs.
The better option would be to hire a remote SEO team to manage yourself. That’s what we’re here to help with! By the end of this guide, you’ll have the tools to find a team tailored for you.
What Does an SEO Team Do for Your Business?
Most associate SEOs with people that can get X website a rank 1 spot in Y keyword. Although that is possible, you need to curb your enthusiasm a bit. The main goal for any business should be delivering quality, high-value content to its target audience.
SEO simply becomes the means to achieve this goal. Several things are going on behind the scenes other than writing quality content, such as:
- Structured website data
- Faster site speed
- Internal Linking
- Backlink Building
- Establishing Topical Authority
A dedicated SEO team can provide all of this and much more. Now that you know the basics, here’s a checklist you can look back on when deciding to hire a remote SEO team:
Hiring and Managing a Remote SEO Team: A Qualification Checklist
There’s a ton of nuance involved in SEO, and trust us when we say that it goes deep. But Managing an SEO team doesn’t mean you need to be an expert.
However, before you start hiring and building your team it’s important that you have fast, reliable, and secure internet at hand to maintain end-to-end remote communication between all personnel. For this purpose, we suggest Xfinity Internet as the provider of choice for scaling your business to the next level.
The same goes for hiring. You just need to know what they can offer aside from the typical “I can get you to rank 1” cold emails. Here’s a checklist to consider:
What Type of SEO Can They Do?
SEO can be split into three categories: On page, Off Page, and Technical SEO. Ideally, you want a team that can do all three. Remember, SEO needs a holistic approach.
On-page SEO refers to optimizations on all content and elements visible to the user.
Off-page SEO improves your website’s online presence behind the scenes.
Technical SEO optimizes a site’s technical aspects, such as speed and architecture.
Some follow white hat SEO practices (Tried and true strategies within Google Guidelines). You want to work with these people. Others use black hat SEO (Strategies against guidelines).
What Tools Do They Use?
There are several great tools for supporting SEO campaigns, like SEMRush and AHrefs. What’s important is that they use a tool to streamline their work. With a dedicated tool, they can give regular site audits, improve backlinking, and do competitor research.
They should also use collaboration tools like Trello and Slack to provide you with updates and help you manage their campaigns better.
How Do They Track Progress?
The best way to track progress is to pit your goals against key performance indicators (KPIs). An SEO team must provide data-driven reports based on metrics from their tools and Google’s own Data Studio and Analytics to contextualize KPIs.
With the basic checklist out of the way, let’s discover where we can find quality SEOs.
Where To Find Remote SEO Teams
The freelance industry has a surplus of SEOs vying for clients. Finding them is easy. You want to take your time to ensure they’re a perfect fit for your business. Here’s a list of places where you can find a remote SEO team to hire.
Upwork
You can find SEOs with a quick search in Upwork. Posting an SEO job position is just as simple. Expect hundreds of hits from freelancers with hourly rates ranging from $6 to over $50 in a few hours after posting. But even hiring the highest-rated SEOs is a gamble. So, if qualifying SEO prospects take too long on this platform, try these Upwork Alternatives.
Fiverr
Fiverr works in the same vein as Upwork. The biggest difference is that clients can cancel ongoing projects and issue a refund. It’s excellent for simple projects with linear goals. However, SEO is nothing but linear. So this is a platform we unfortunately couldn’t recommend.
LinkedIn is one of the most ideal places to find SEOs. You can search SEOs and connect with them directly. Here, you can easily learn more about them, their previous projects, and if they actively interact with other professionals in the industry.
What better way to ensure SEOs are worth their mettle than a Google Search? But the majority of the top spots are already covered by massive companies. So, be specific with what type of SEO you’re going for. For example, you can try “remote + {industry} + SEO + {location}.”
Reddit can be a goldmine if you know where to look. Look into subreddits like r/forhire, r/SEO, or r/BigSeo for SEO services. There are also subreddits for specific SEO needs, like r/technicalSEO and r/ShopifySEO.
Key Takeaways
SEO should never be an afterthought. Make sure you hire the right team for the job. As a quick refresher, here are some key insights to help you hire and manage a remote SEO team.
- Hire a remote team that can offer a holistic approach to SEO.
- Always ask how they can track progress and KPIs.
- Use platforms like Trello or Slack to easily manage SEO campaigns.
- Make sure they’re using white hat SEO to avoid penalties.
- You can hire SEO teams on sites like LinkedIn, reddit, Upwork or Fiverr.
